Kitchen Confidential: Reviewing the Underbelly of the Culinary World
“This is for the cooks.” Anthony Bourdain may have drawn this conclusion in the Preface of Kitchen Confidential, but you do not need to be part of the swashbuckling fraternity of cooks to enjoy this book.
I’ve been a Bourdain fanboy for over a decade. But I had never actually read this magnum opus, the book that changed Bourdain’s life and set him on a path to celebrity chef and travel documentarian stardom. I finally finished it last month.
One of my best friends had put me onto this guy in 2010. We were backpacking across Europe, hostel to hostel, indulging in some of the best food, culture, and history we had experienced to that point in life. For years I felt I had already read the book because I had vicariously experienced it through him.
When the pandemic hit and my wanderlust for travel came to a screeching halt, I vicariously traveled through Bourdain. I rewatched multiple seasons of Parts Unknown. Meanwhile, this book waited for me, aging like a fine wine. I always knew it was there.
The closest I’ve come to working in a real commercial kitchen was as a “Sandwich Artist” at Subway and as a service deli employee at a grocery store. So while I could not relate to every part of this book, Bourdain’s straightforward style – his “Kitchenese” as he calls it, or the secret language of cooks – invites you into his world. It’s almost like sitting down with Tony for a late night beer at his favorite old Manhattan haunt (now defunct), Siberia Bar.
The Overall Take
Many people over the past couple decades have read this book and taken away what NOT to do when patronizing a restaurant. Don’t order fish on Monday, for example. That bread on your table? It may have been leftover from the previous customers. Eat at your own risk and desire.
I could care less about those nuggets of culinary and restaurant wisdom. For me, the true value of this book is learning about what it takes to be a cook. Putting myself in their shoes. It’s understanding who actually is cooking your food when you go out to eat. Oftentimes, despite a restaurant calling itself French, it is not a Frenchman cooking your food.
The guy running the sauté station or the one sweating over the flaming grill is likely Ecuadorian, Mexican, or some other Latin American nationality. Tony honors and respects these people immensely. Based on his descriptions of the physical (and mental) toll cooking takes, it’s understandable why he holds anyone who can hang in a professional kitchen in such high regard.
In contrast to his fine dining celebrity chef friends like Eric Ripert, Tony worked primarily on pirate ships, as he liked to call them. Sure, he worked in the “bigs”, two and three star joints in Manhattan, but I got the sense that he was most at home at a humble brasserie like Les Halles, serving well-executed working class food with flair and passion.
His disdain for celebrity chef culture was ironic back then because little did he know, that’s what he would become. Although for anyone who has watched his various travel shows, he always made a point of seeking out humble food that was made with creativity and love. That’s what I loved about him most. The authenticity.
“The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican and Salvadorian cooks I’ve worked with over the years make most Culinary Institute of America-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks”
Anthony Bourdain
The only thing you get in Kitchen Confidential is pure, authentic, punk rock cooking.
The Pirate Ship Captain
The book is organized like a menu. And in true punk rock fashion, he ends the meal with a coffee and a cigarette. Hell yeah.
The book tracks his life in the culinary industry, from visits to France in his youth, to his formative years in Provincetown, MA and at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), and finally, to some of the best kitchens throughout Manhattan. His anecdotes are as vivid as they are entertaining. From the lewd and crude to the informative and instructional, it is hard not to enjoy and learn from this book.
He even includes a chapter on “How to Cook Like the Pros.” It’s filled with the basics for every aspiring cook and home chef. For example, “You need, for God’s sake, a decent chef’s knife.” And my favorite, “Misuse of garlic is a crime.” Tony will tell you to “make your own stock” and that commercial options suck.
While Tony bestows culinary wisdom on his readers, this pirate ship captain also pays homage to his mentors. Guys like Bigfoot, which was a code name for Andy Menschel, a West Village legend. He taught Tony that a restaurant is about more than food. Although Bigfoot sounded a bit sadist in the book, it was clear that his lessons resonated with Tony, from when to show up to work (15 minutes early) to understanding “that character is far more important than skills or employment history.”
“Skills can be taught. Character you either have or don’t have.”
Bigfoot
I also loved what Bigfoot taught Tony about how to deal with purveyors. He played them against each other, driving their prices down. As Tony described, “God help the poor meat guys if Peter Luger was paying two cents less a pound than Bigfoot was.”
So while Bigfoot may not have been the nicest or best mentor anyone could have, the lessons here are applicable to all of us, regardless of industry. Most importantly, know everything about your workplace. Gather intelligence. You should never be surprised. Otherwise you might lose your rank (or worse) as captain of the pirate ship.
The Journeyman Chef
Tony never seemed to find his way as a chef until he arrived at Les Halles (where he worked when he published this book in 2000). Even then, he was no Eric Ripert. He freely admits it in the book too.
Despite being classically trained at CIA and having worked in some of the best kitchens in the world, he never became a renown executive chef. He was more famous for his writing and travel documentaries, particularly No Reservations and Parts Unknown.
He chronicles his life as a journeyman chef from the legendary Rainbow Room to an outpost of a New York City restaurant in Baltimore, and back to New York City again, working for famous restaurateurs like Pino Luongo. Tony even gained respect for Italian cuisine, which as a classically trained French chef was saying something. The chapter on his “Tuscan Interlude” is captivating for this reason.
The most illuminating chapter though was “A Day in the Life.” I’m not sure how any human could repeat this type of day on a regular basis, but apparently Tony did. It illustrated how special and unique anyone is who works for decades in the restaurant industry. The mental and physical demands lead many – including Tony – to self-medicate and relieve stress through drugs and alcohol.
He makes working as a cook sound like going to war everyday. Industry veterans are often undervalued and underpaid. They come from other countries or the fringes of society. Yet they grind. They work hard. And the dining public – all of us – benefit from their hard labor. You cannot help but empathize with the many journeymen like Tony when reading this book.
Industry Love
By the end of the book I didn’t want to be a cook, but I loved everyone who was one or aspired to be. As someone who is passionate about consuming the best food from street carts to white linen, this book unsurprisingly resonated with me.
Tony’s love for his crew, sous-chef, and fellow chefs and cooks made me miss the presence of his spirit in this world even more. I’m just sad I waited so long to read Kitchen Confidential. The passion seeps from every page. It becomes immediately clear that this guy was never meant to have a “normal” life.
While I hold The Gastronomical Me in high regard insofar as food writing is concerned, Kitchen Confidential has to take the top spot in the genre. It is so raw and real, passionate and pure. Tony, like MFK Fisher, even breaks down his first experience with an oyster. Magical.
Even if you are not obsessed with food like me, I am confident you will find this book eye-opening and entertaining. So please indulge me as I leave you with this, my favorite passage from the book:
“How much longer am I going to do this?
I don’t know. I love it, you see.
I love heating duck confit, saucisson de canard, confit gizzards, saucisson de Toulouse, poitrine and duck fat with those wonderful tarbais beans, spooning it into an earthenware crock and sprinkling it with breadcrumbs. I love making those little mountains of chive-mashed potatoes, wild mushrooms, ris de veau, a nice, tall micro-green salad as garnish, drizzling a perfectly reduced sauce around the plate with my favorite spoon. I enjoy the look on the face of my boss when I do a pot-au-feu special – the look of sheer delight as he takes the massive bowl of braised hooves, shoulders and tails in, the simple boiled turnips, potatoes and carrots looking just right, just the way it should be. I love that look, as I loved the look on Pino’s face when he gazed upon a perfect bowl of spaghetti alla chitarra, the same look I get when I approach a Scott Bryan daube of beef, a plate of perfect oysters. It’s a gaze of wonder: the same look you see on small children’s faces when their fathers take them into deep water at the beach, and it’s always a beautiful thing. For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we’ve all had to become disappears, when we’re confronted with something as simple as a plate of food. When we remember what it was that moved us down this road in the first place.”
Anthony Bourdain
Rest in peace.
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